A typical local retail pharmacy fills thousands of prescription orders per week. Moreover, as the general population ages and new beneficial drugs are introduced, prescription order volumes to be filled at retail pharmacies are expected to double within the next few years. This present and expected increase in order volume places enormous pressure on pharmacists and other pharmacy workers, who strive to fill each order efficiently, accurately and quickly.
Most customers have a limited view of how a typical retail pharmacy works. They often think that when they present a written prescription order to a local retail pharmacy, such as at their corner drugstore, a pharmacist will personally greet them, review their order, complete and file the necessary paperwork required by applicable laws, fill the prescription order, and present the filled order to the customer, all within a few minutes. However, in addition to increasing volume, the traditional retail pharmacist is now faced with a large variety of additional tasks, including obtaining proper insurance payment authorization, and in some cases verifying the refillabilty of a particular prescription order. Moreover, orders may now enter the pharmacy through a wide variety of mediums, such as via facsimile, phone call, and e-mail.
In light of the increasing demands and obligations placed on retail pharmacies, they are evolving into more efficient organizations having numerous employees performing individual tasks associated with filling each prescription order. For example, when a customer presents a prescription to the pharmacy, a clerk may take the prescription order and enter it into a computer system that verifies insurance information. If approved, he or she may then prepare a prescription label to be placed on the package that will ultimately contain the prescribed drug. The clerk may then present the prescription order and label to a technician, usually stationed at another location within the pharmacy, who will physically fill the prescription by placing the appropriate quantity of the prescribed drug within the bottle and attach the label. Pursuant to applicable laws, a registered pharmacist then reviews the technician's work, and approves the dispersal of the completed prescription order to the customer. A clerk may then place the filled prescription in a storage area to await customer pick-up. Upon customer pick-up, the clerk files the written prescription order and any other appropriate paperwork related to the transaction, such as signed insurance forms and any informed consent paperwork. This type of system allows the pharmacy to quickly, efficiently, and economically fill numerous prescription orders.
In addition, a growing number of retail pharmacies are using remote filling stations to process some prescription orders. In general, the retail pharmacy receives an order from a customer, and completes the necessary steps to fill the prescription. However, instead of filling the prescription order in-house, the request is transferred, usually electronically, to a remote filling station, that fills the order and ships the filled order back to the pharmacy for distribution to the client. Usually, all the orders processed from a particular remote filling station are shipped to the retail pharmacy in one container, and considerable paperwork usually accompanies the container to document the filling of each prescription order. Accordingly, considerable pharmacy worker time and effort is spent processing the bulk shipment of filled prescriptions and related paperwork, such as entering information into the retail pharmacy's computer system, and distributing the filled prescription orders to a storage area for individual customer pick-up.
Given the high volume of prescription orders being filled, the large number of people performing individual tasks associated with filling each prescription order, and the numerous locations within and outside of the pharmacy that a prescription order can be positioned as it is being filled, it is important that the prescription order, and ultimately the filled prescription, be easily located and identified throughout the process. For example, if a particular prescription order is denied payment by insurance, a clerk may hold the prescription order aside while the customer is contacted. If the customer presents himself to another clerk at the pick-up window, while the first clerk is attempting to call the customer at home, the second clerk often has no way of knowing the current status of the prescription order, or where it is in the order filling process. Accordingly, the second clerk is forced to search each location within the pharmacy.
In addition, should a prescription order be inadvertently misplaced within the pharmacy, it is often difficult to find, thereby needlessly delaying the filling process and wasting worker time to locate it. Similarly, it is desirable for pharmacy workers to be able to easily identify and locate particular prescription orders that meet predefined criteria, such as having fallen behind a promised customer pick-up time.
Some pharmacy vendors have attempted to overcome these problems by offering systems that manually track prescription orders within a pharmacy. In particular, they require the worker at a given station to manually enter into a computer the fact that they have received a particular prescription order at that particular location. However, in addition to the lost time associated with manually entering this information at each station, evidence suggest that many workers find this repetitive task cumbersome, and as a result, they often fail to manually enter such information. Accordingly, these types of tracking systems are rendered useless.
Similarly, some pharmacy vendors have attempted to automate the prescription filling aspect of a pharmacy by incorporating an automatic assembly line process for filling prescription orders. In particular, an operator enters a prescription order into a computer system, which causes a conveyor-type system to deliver an empty vial to an automated drug dispenser. The filled vial is then automatically matched with a label and presented to a pharmacist for final review and approval. While these types of devices facilitate the quick and efficient filling of prescription orders, they are expensive for use in a retail pharmacy environment, and they occupy a large amount of limited space within the pharmacy. Moreover, they still require pharmacy workers to perform manual tasks such as verifying insurance and renewability of the prescription, and processing the various forms of prescription orders before and after they are entered into the automated system. Accordingly, they do not permit the easy location of prescription orders as they travel within the automated pharmacy environment, or easy identification of the prescription orders that have fallen behind a predetermined timeframe established for the pharmacy to fill the prescription order.